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EAU CLAIRE — Bradley Carter said using zebrafish as a research model has been something that scientists have done for over 50 years.
“I think some of it was people initially wanting to study development and embryogenesis,” he said. “The zebrafish started as a system back in the ’60s and ’70s, and it started out at the University of Oregon.”
On campus, Carter, associate professor of biology at the University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire and instructor of courses in the neuroscience program, houses hundreds of these fish as a tool to help learn about human brain development. Throughout the year, Carter works with students to study the genetic development of the fish.
While the tropical Southeast Asian “pet store level” fish do not have any unique biological features, what does stand out is their rapid growth. The incubation period for a zebrafish takes about three days as a transparent embryo. After hatching, they hit their adult stage only three to four months later.
“You’re getting just tons of all these important biological processes happening in a condensed timescale,” Carter said. “So that even by a day, you’re going from a single cell to a little fish.
“And that allows you then to ask about when the body forms, when the eyes form, when the brain forms, the muscle forms. You’d have to watch for months in a human setting to observe these processes.”
As for why scientists, professors and university students may want to study this process, Carter said in their case it is helping to answer some biological questions.
“We’re interested in how the brain forms and functions and clinical connections to things like autism or things that we think are neurodevelopmental in nature that somehow start or occur when the brain is being made or formed,” he said. “Those are really interesting things and we want to know more about them, but in some ways it’s hard to study that in people. We’re getting better all the time, but there’s still some aspects of neurodevelopment that are hard to measure in utero and such.
“The fish offers a technical advantage to that kind of question, and they are helpful because they have enough similarities to be relevant to understanding our brains.
“They are vertebrates, and a lot of the cellular signaling that goes on to make a vertebrate brain is conserved.”
At UW-Eau Claire, Carter said one of the things they are now looking at is prenatal stress and cortisol, a hormone associated with stress, and looking at how that affects early development in the brain.
For the undergraduate researchers working alongside Carter, the fast growing model allows for several opportunities as documenting iterations. With each experiment, results and observations can be made within a week, allowing the researchers to go back and see if there is anything else which affects the outcome.
Looking at the potential applications of these is something that their team of students can get excited about, Carter said. But on top of neuroscience applications, he said the biggest goal of the project has been building those student experiences in a collegiate setting.
“Part of why I chose to get into working with zebrafish was that student component, that it was a system that was accessible for faculty to work with undergraduates and give them a lot of responsibility and autonomy,” he said. “I want to develop students as scientists and critical thinkers and for them to experience the wonder of discovery, the uncertainty of not knowing the answer and then figuring it out and designing a way to do that and dealing with not knowing. There’s a lot of really important skills in modern society and the modern economy that definitely happen in the undergraduate research setting. For some of the students, this may be the first time they’ve had that amount of responsibility over what they’re doing in a professional setting.”
With students continuing to research and explore neuroscience through zebrafish, Carter said, “I think the students here are doing really strong work.”
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